Another Soccer Season

So today kicked off another season of soccer for the boys. Ben is at the age where the kids are really starting to separate out according to ability and talent. Andrew is at the age where we are still playing “magnet ball.” It sure makes refereeing Andrew’s games easy ;).

Zack loves it too. He has suddenly inherited all of the older boys old soccer equipment and he is ready to play! He entertains and amazes the other parents on the sidelines with his ball handling skills and his energy. Frankly, he’s better than about half the kids on Andrew’s team and a couple of the kids on Ben’s team. If only he wasn’t so short…

I was getting really frustrated with Ben at his game today because the coach kept yelling at him to do stuff and he wasn’t listening. In reality there are actually 2 Bens on the team and coach was yelling at the other one. The ref was getting frustrated with the kids too, but he couldn’t seem to remember that he had a whistle so he was yelling at them – A LOT . This didn’t sit well with the parents who also weren’t very impressed with his first time refereeing skills. Lucky for him, the head ref for the division has a son on the team and took him aside for some private tutelage after the game.

I got to ref Andrew’s game and I’m sure there were plenty of parent’s upset with me because if I had called everything you should call there would not have been a game. If you’ve ever watched “magnet ball” soccer you know what I’m talking about. For those of you who don’t know “magnet ball” soccer consists of a magnetic monopole soccer pole that behaves like the North end of a magnet and the kids act like South magnetic monopoles. Occasionally, the South poles converge on the North pole in such a way that it squirts out of the group and the mob shifts one way or another down the field. The strategy is to place the one kid on your team who can outrun everybody at the edge of the group so that when the ball squirts out he can take it and score. Practice is harder than theory.

It’s kind of funny because in the mob around the ball there is a lot of jockeying for position. It’s not uncommon for a kid to come up to me and complain that he was “pushed.” Often I happen to have witnessed that it was his own teammate that shoved him to the ground. Se la vie.

We’ll see what the season brings but I sense a shift in the boys interest trending from soccer to baseball.